grief & rage
jaguar woman, women on fire
“Though her soul requires seeing, the culture around her requires sightlessness. Though her soul wishes to speak its truth, she is pressured to be silent.” - Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves
Beneath the old roots of some long forgotten Cottonwood deep in the forest along one of the last existing trickling springs of this sacred mountain, there lives a cave.
A hollow beneath the water and ice, where a tiny sound can be heard by those who have long time developed their finely tuned furry ears, who can lean deep and close and breathe in the smell of decay and wet earth like the food it truly is.
The cave opens its mouth here to this world, but its belly lives down there, deep, beyond the darkness and sod and twisted root paths of long gone trees. And it’s belly is singing.
Some can hear it. An ancient, indistinguishable language; a chant, a melody, a ringing true of something boundless within the spiraling genetics of each human being. The song calls to some, others have learned to glue their ears shut. Only those willing to dowse themselves in the waters of Life, of transformation, in the mud and the ash, the fire, the thorn and breeze; only those, willing to die a hundred deaths, are allowed to enter this sacred opening.
I can’t tell you what’s down there. It’s for each to discover, in their own time, in their own way. But I can tell you that at the brim of this cave, there are women.
Women on fire. Flaming feet grooving against the wet earth, burning life into the banks of the stream, spinning webs of chaos and grief, feeling, feeling, feeling. These are the gatekeepers, the dancers of truth, the embodied warrior women of feeling, moving in the heat of Creation, dancing the faces of the Goddess: the rage, the beauty, the power, the wonder.
Aflame with Life and the depth that Life requires of us.
That’s why few make it in.
We are afraid of depth. We’ve learned to turn away, ignore, repress, withhold, bury, torture, subdue, deny, erase, conceal. We’ve over-spiritualized ourselves. We’ve disassociated. We’ve adopted the denial of our ancestors. We’re afraid the depth might consume us, torch us from the inside out. We are afraid to feel.
So I lit a fire.
A really, really big one.
I built it with the kindling of my ancestors’ inability to embody their truth. I built it with their shame. I pulled twigs of their guilt and disassociation, branches of their pain and confusion. I piled it high, the repression, the rage, the denial. I stretched out the hides of their armor, the chains of their culture. I unwrapped the blood-soaked bandages of their beliefs, and I let the sunlight touch their wounds. I wept beneath the weight. I kept going.
And one morning, as I crept in close to the whispering twigs of generations gone past, I heard them praying, weeping, almost singing like shimmering water, and I knew it was time.
I brought the candle, a slow burning beeswax candle. I placed it between the kindling and the cold earth, and I climbed up to the top of the pile and let myself burn.
✧
When the smoke finally reached the mouth of the cave, beneath the roots of the old Cottonwood, deep in the forest where one of the last trickling springs of this sacred mountain dances her way through the wild rose and willow, it smelled sweet, like copal, and it started to rain.
